Tour de Meh

Turn Down the Music and Read: Rock On... This Is Actually Good, Because…

Tour de Meh

This July, for the first time in about fifteen years, I have not woken up at the butt crack of dawn to drink my coffee and glance through the newspaper while watching (slightly delayed) live coverage of the Tour de France with my husband and kids. We did not pick fantasy teams and place actual money bets; we are not poring over the thick “TDF Official Guide” issues of Velo News and Cycle Sports; we are not re-watching epic crashes and post-race analysis from Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen after dinner each night.

In short, what has been a family tradition since the girls were old enough to say, “That’s a time twial helmet” as they watch a cyclist reach the end of his endurance during the month-long circuit of France, is now gone, discarded, marked only by this blog post. July is, once again, like every other month of the year.

Screw you, Lance Armstrong, and all your doper friends too. You ruined the entire sport for us, and ended a tradition that bound our family together as a team.

Oh, I mean, it’s not like we didn’t suspect there was doping going on all along. Every year from the mid-90s forward, some hotshot rider was pulled from the course for failing a drug test, and in the off season you’d read about pro cyclists in their twenties dying of heart conditions that looked suspiciously like drug side effects. But those weren’t household names (I mean, not even in my household. I get that you probably don’t know your Schleck Brothers from your Spartacus.)

And then the bigger name dominoes began to fall: Tyler Hamilton, such a tiny little man that I felt like I could probably carry him around in my bike basket, but who was so tough that he rode the 2003 race with a broken collarbone and required dental surgery afterward for grinding his teeth down to nubs. Floyd Landis, who we watched win a stage in southern France on Bastille Day 2006. Ivan Basso. Danilo Di Luca. Vino, the Kazakh cyborg. The pattern was louder than Garmin’s ill-advised Argyle team uniform.

Still, I held on as a fan. I’m an optimist. They were catching the bad guys, right? The riders wouldn’t keep taking risks at the rate they were getting snatched up by drug testers, right?

Last October, on the day that George Hincapie released a statement that acknowledged his doping, that’s the day I gave up. George was Lance’s second in command and the only rider to stay beside him for his seven tour wins, and my mom and I shared a not-very-secret fondness for the quiet giant from North Carolina whose ears stuck out like handles on a toddler cup. He was always courteous to the press, married a podium girl and was raising little kids. A guy like that wouldn’t dope, would he?

He would, and he did, and I’m done. Why am I wasting any time on a sport where a person endowed with amazing natural talent and perseverance still needs to inject, intubate, transfuse to win? That’s not a sport. That’s a medical experiment.

We have a couple of friends here in Oakland who have never understood what the appeal was of cycling, who were openly derisive about what they said was “obviously” doping in the sport, who didn’t quite see the point of the shaved legs and the aerodynamic helmets and analyzing the outfits of the podium girls. I felt sorry for them. I married a guy who loves cycling—doing it and watching it–and he patiently explained it to me over the years. I grew to love its drama and beauty and strategy (yes, it truly is a team sport.)

A few weeks after the notorious Oprah interview with Lance Armstrong last fall, I methodically removed every piece of Armstrong memorabilia in the house. We have a lot: my sister in law worked for the cancer foundation, and my husband rode in fundraisers for cancer research under the LiveStrong umbrella. All that stuff is in the storage unit now. I can’t quite throw it in the trash, though I couldn’t tell you what’s stopping me. Pride that my husband worked so hard to ride well in those events, probably.

And—ok—maybe I still read the stage recaps in the news every day in July. But when Chris Froome won the Mont Ventoux climb yesterday on Stage 15 , my first reaction was: “He was probably doping.” On the one hundredth anniversary of the Tour, the cynicism with which the cyclists treated the sport has leached out into the world and come back to bite them in their Chamois-Butt’rd butts.

Way to win, Cycling.

Maybe Those Darlins can’t help it, but you could have.